Amazon KDP Niche Research – 5 Tools to Find Profitable Book Topics
You might see Amazon as a bookstore, but in fact, it operates as a search engine. When people are looking for books to buy on Amazon, they usually type in keywords to find them. For example, if they want to find a book about cooking, in the Amazon search bar, they enter a keyword like “cooking books,” or something more specific like “cooking books for kids.” And books that have those keywords in their title, description, or keyword list will appear in the search results. Since your goal is to make sure your book appears in the relevant search results, you need to find the most profitable keywords for your book. That’s why I have created this list of tools for Kindle niche research.
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If you just publish your book without putting any thought into how it will rank on Amazon’s algorithm, you likely won’t see many sales.
5 Tools to Do Amazon KDP Niche Research and Find Profitable Book Topics
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AMZ Suggestion Expander – Amazon KDP Niche Research Tool
Put yourself in the shoes of one of your readers and picture the kind of phrases he might enter into the Amazon search box when looking for your book. Start typing a word and see what auto-suggestions Amazon offers. For example, “social media a..,” “social media b…,” “social media c….” And so on with every letter of the alphabet – till “z.”
If you have installed the free Google Chrome extension AMZ Suggestion Expander, it will expand the number of search suggestions that are shown in the Amazon search bar, like in the picture below. It will also show the keywords that Amazon would suggest before and after the ones you have entered.
Thanks to this Amazon Kindle niche research tool, you can quickly see what keywords people use when trying to find books about your topic on Amazon.
Each “keyword” can actually be made up of several separate words.
For best results, use phrases that are 2-4 words long.
Don’t use single words, because they are too generic and won’t work. Your readers are most likely not going to search for a single word on Amazon but rather a more specific phrase, so the search results are more relevant. Moreover, shorter phrases or single words also usually have a very high competition. The goal of this task is to have a list of 10-15 appropriate keywords so that you have options to choose from when you are ready to choose your book title and publish your book.
2. Amazon Book Sales Calculator
Click on your competitor books and scroll down to the “Product Details” section to find “Amazon Best Sellers Rank” or ABSR. It shows where each book ranks compared to other books within the entire Kindle store. The general rule is – the bigger the number, the fewer sales this book is making. It also means if your sales increase, your ranking improves (and it moves closer to #1). If your sales decrease, your ranking worsens.
To put it in perspective, if the book rank is #80,336, it means that there are currently 80,335 books that are selling better than this book. Although nobody (except Amazon) knows the exact numbers, the general estimates are that anything over #100,000 is selling less than one copy a day on average. But anything that is under #1000 is selling hundreds of copies a day. Even if ABSR is 10,000-20,000, the sales are really great – about 10-20 books a day.
You can easily get the estimated sales of each book by using this Amazon book sales calculator. Simply type in the ABSR’s and see the calculations.
3. KDP Niche Finder – Keywords Everywhere
Use Keywords Everywhere browser extension as an additional Amazon Kindle niche research tool that will help you evaluate the potential number of search results for a given keyword. Thanks to this tool, each time you search for a keyword on Amazon, you can immediately see the number of the estimated monthly search volume on Google. Therefore, you can compare which keyword is more popular. For example, the “dog training books” keyword is used about 4 400 times a month. But if you type in “how to train your dog,” you will see that its search volume is only about 12 100 a month. It means that the “how to train your dog” keyword is more popular and might be a better choice for positioning your book.
Although these numbers don’t reflect the precise search statistics on Amazon, they can help you choose the most popular among several keywords.
Unfortunately, Keywords Everywhere is not a free tool anymore as it used to be. But it’s not expensive. You can get 10,000 keyword searches for $10, and it’s more than enough. This tool can be very helpful during your keyword research phase.
Once installed, Keywords Everywhere automatically starts showing search volume and competition data also in other supported sites, like, Google, Amazon, YouTube, and others.
4. Amazon Book Categories Finder – Bklnk.com
If you want to see what categories you or your competitor books are listed in, copy their ASINs from their book product pages, go to this tool, and enter them here. You will see all the categories where these books are listed on Amazon.
BKLNK can also help you find other related categories you didn’t even know existed. If you click on the small button “Catalize,” it will show other categories that are related to the ones listed for the books in that genre.
Go through these categories and find the ones that would be the easiest to rank for, e.g., you will need fewer daily sales to become a bestseller in your chosen categories. It will take some time and manual work, but it will be worth it.
5. The Ultimate KDP Research Tool – Publisher Rocket
If you want to go an easier and much faster way, use Publisher Rocket. This Amazon Kindle niche research tool will do all the hard work for you in seconds. And, instead of 4 tools, you will need only this one.
For example, if you do a keyword search with Publisher Rocket, you can quickly get a list of competing books that rank for your chosen keyword; how profitable this keyword is, how many times Google has searched for it, and what Amazon monthly search estimate is. And, how hard it would be to rank your book for that keyword. The lower the number, the easier it is to rank.
If you press the “Competition” button, you will also see the most popular books that rank for this keyword. How long ago the book was published, its sales rank (the lower the number, the better its sales are), number of pages, and if the book has this keyword in its title or subtitle. If no, it will be easier to rank your book for this keyword. Also, its price and daily and monthly sales estimates.
You can also see the categories these books are listed in. Either by clicking on the books one by one or generating the entire list of all categories that you can export and later use as your book categories.
Do your category search also by keywords and sort the results by daily estimated sales. As you can see, in order to rank number one in the “Horses->Showing&Training” category, you need to sell only two books a day. But to rank for at least the number 10 spot, you need to sell only one book a day. This way, you can quickly find the categories that are easiest to rank your book as a bestseller in its category.
Although Publisher Rocket is not a free Amazon Kindle research tool (you will need to make a one-time investment), it’s a huge time saver. And, if you are serious about building your passive income stream with Kindle book publishing, I highly suggest you have it, because it definitely will pay off.
Can you suggest other good tools for Amazon Kindle niche research? Then tell about them in the comments section below!
If you want to learn a few more strategies to sell more books on Amazon, get my free book “5 Secret Strategies of Kindle Publishing: Earn Passive Income with Non-fiction Books“. It will show you how to use Amazon algorithm for your own benefit and write books that help you sell more books on Amazon.
Comments
This was very helpful information, thank you for listing these tools out and explaining how they work. It’s great to have free basic tools until I’m ready to invest in a paid tool.
Hello Anita. Great information for those of us who are venturing in the non-fiction e-book business! I also found another intesting tool for Amazon Kindle niche research, named Titans Pro (https://selfpublishingtitans.com). What’s your insight of this tool?
this is great information for all novice writers planning on a book of some sort. This helps to refine their plan over all. Awesome information! thank you